The author has traveled since a teen and hitchhiked around North America beginning at seventeen. He left San Francisco State University at twenty-two where he was the only undergrad in the graduate writng department to journey to South Dakota as the student of an Oglala Lakota medicine man but fled with the medicine man's abused girlfriend andranged from the Canadian rockies to Mexico, Heattended the University of Oregon's journalism dept.m and has lived in the Northwest and Alaska since. He is a co-founder of the Alaska Writers Guild, and worked with the American Indian Movement during the occupation of Alcatraz. He's fished, logged, built cabins in the wilderness of the Northwest and Alaska, and has rescued a dozen sex slaves while operating and owning cabs in Alaska since the pipeline days. He's known corrupt cops and politicians, upright madams and honorable criminals,spent a dark winter under a pall of volcanic ash and snow keeping fifteen starving moose alive, and stared down the muzzle blast of a pistol at eighteen. He loves the haunted places of the west, from the Barbary Coast to the dirt streets of Dawson City Yukon Territory, to the wind swept ruins in some lost canyon in the desert, and often finds the ghosts he finds there good company. With proper coaxing they occasionally speak to him, and will be teaching a class soon called F**k Genre.